Posts Tagged 'Redundant'

When I was a kid, my living room often served as a "job site" where I managed a fleet of construction vehicles. Scaled-down versions of cranes, dump trucks, bulldozers and tractor-trailers littered the floor, and I oversaw the construction (and subsequent destruction) of some pretty monumental projects. Fast-forward a few years (or decades), and not much has changed except that the "heavy machinery" has gotten a lot heavier, and I'm a lot less inclined to "destruct." As SoftLayer's vice president of facilities, part of my job is to coordinate the early logistics of our data center expansions, and as it turns out, that responsibility often involves overseeing some of the big rigs that my parents tripped over in my youth.

The video below documents the installation of a new Cummins two-megawatt diesel generator for a pod in our DAL05 data center. You see the crane prepare for the work by installing counter-balance weights, and work starts with the team placing a utility transformer on its pad outside our generator yard. A truck pulls up with the generator base in tow, and you watch the base get positioned and lowered into place. The base looks so large because it also serves as the generator's 4,000 gallon "belly" fuel tank. After the base is installed, the generator is trucked in, and it is delicately picked up, moved, lined up and lowered onto its base. The last step you see is the generator housing being installed over the generator to protect it from the elements. At this point, the actual "installation" is far from over — we need to hook everything up and test it — but those steps don't involve the nostalgia-inducing heavy machinery you probably came to this post to see:

When we talk about the "megawatt" capacity of a generator, we're talking about the bandwidth of power available for use when the generator is operating at full capacity. One megawatt is one million watts, so a two-megawatts generator could power 20,000 100-watt light bulbs at the same time. This power can be sustained for as long as the generator has fuel, and we have service level agreements to keep us at the front of the line to get more fuel when we need it. Here are a few other interesting use-cases that could be powered by a two-megawatt generator:

1,000 Average Homes During Mild Weather

400 Homes During Extreme Weather

20 Fast Food Restaurants

3 Large Retail Stores

2.5 Grocery Stores

A SoftLayer Data Center Pod Full of Servers (Most Important Example!)

Every SoftLayer facility has an n+1 power architecture. If we need three generators to provide power for three data center pods in one location, we'll install four. This additional capacity allows us to balance the load on generators when they're in use, and we can take individual generators offline for maintenance without jeopardizing our ability to support the power load for all of the facility's data center pods.

Those of you who are in the fondly remember Tonka trucks and CAT crane toys are the true target audience for this post, but even if you weren't big into construction toys when you were growing up, you'll probably still appreciate the work we put into safeguarding our facilities from a power perspective. You don't often see the "outside the data center" work that goes into putting a new SoftLayer data center pod online, so I thought it'd give you a glimpse. Are there an topics from an operations or facilities perspectives that you also want to see?

Since our inception in 2005, SoftLayer's goal has been to provide an array of on-demand data center and hosting services that combine exceptional access, control, scalability and security with unparalleled network robustness and ease of use ... That's why we're so excited to unveil SoftLayer Object Storage to our customers.

OpenStack has been phenomenally successful thanks to a global software community comprised of developers and other technologists that has built and tweaked a standards-based, massively scalable open-source platform for public and private cloud computing. The simple goal of the OpenStack project is to deliver code that enables any organization to create and offer feature-rich cloud computing services from industry-standard hardware. The overarching OpenStack technology consists of several interrelated project components: One for compute, one for an image service, one for object storage, and a few more projects in development.

SoftLayer Object Storage
Like the OpenStack Swift system on which it is based, SoftLayer Object Storage is not a file system or real-time data-storage system, rather it's a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged and updated when necessary. Typical applications for this type of storage can involve virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving.

One of the primary benefits of Object Storage is the role that it can play in automating and streamlining data storage in cloud computing environments. SoftLayer Object Storage offers rich metadata features and search capability that can be leveraged to automate the way unstructured data gets accessed. In this way, SoftLayer Object Storage will provide organizations with new capabilities for improving overall data management and storage efficiency.

File Storage v. Object Storage
To better understand the difference between file storage and object storage, let's look at how file storage and object storage differ when it comes to metadata and search for a simple photo image. When a digital camera or camera-enabled phone snaps a photo, it embeds a series of metadata values in the image. If you save the image in a standard image file format, you can search for it by standard file properties like name, date and size. If you save the same image with additional metadata as an object, you can set object metadata values for the image (after reading them from the image file). This detail provides granular search capability based on the metadata keys and values, in addition to the standard object properties. Here is a sample comparison of an image's metadata value in both systems:

File Metadata

Object Metadata

Name:img01.jpg

Name:img01.jpg

Date: 2012-02-13

Date:2012-02-13

Size:1.2MB

Size:1.2MB

Manufacturer:CASIO

Model:QV-4000

x-Resolution:72.00

y-Resolution:72.00

PixelXDimension:2240

PixelYDimension:1680

FNumber:f/4.0

Exposure Time:1/659 sec.

Using the rich metadata and search capability enabled by object storage, you would be able to search for all images with a dimension of 2240x1680 or a resolution of 72x72 in a quick/automated fashion. The object storage system "understands" more about what is being stored because it is able to differentiate files based on characteristics that you define.

What Makes SoftLayer Object Storage Different?
SoftLayer Object Storage features several unique features and ways for SoftLayer customers to upload, access and manage data:

We think SoftLayer Object Storage will be attractive to a broad range of current and prospective customers, from web-centric businesses dependent on file sharing and content distribution to legal/medical/financial-services companies which possess large volumes of data that must be stored securely while remaining readily accessible.

SoftLayer Object Storage significantly extends our cloud-services portfolio while substantially enriching the storage capabilities that we bring to our customers. What are you waiting for? Go order yourself some object storage @ $0.12/GB!

RAS Syndrome. It's a condition that plagues not only SoftLayer, but the entire tech industry. Of course, it's not even limited to that - it just happens to hit the tech industry the hardest because of the high amount of acronyms. RAS stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome, so RAS Syndrome stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. See the problem here?

Here are some of my favorite examples:

ATM Machine

PIN Number

DVD Disc

Protocol gets abused a lot:

TCP/IP Protocol

HTTP Protocol

FTP Protocol

SIP Protocol

GUI interface

And of course the list goes on. Sometimes we can get very redundant. Let's start with this example:

Battery Backup Unit (BBU)

We can make this redundant:

BBU Unit

Continuing the trend, we can add "Battery" to this without sounding too out of place:

Battery BBU Unit

You need to be careful because you may use a synonym and still be redundant:

BBU Module

Since "unit" and "module" refer to basically the same thing, this is also redundant.

I'm sure this is enough to get you started thinking about it. In time, I'm sure you'll start discovering new redundant RAS acronyms.